bcrontab(1)

💖 bcrontab(1) — the General Commands Manual glow-up 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the page for bcrontab from the General Commands Manual (section 1, where all the user-facing main character commands live 💅). it's short, it's sweet, and it's gonna make your crontab management lowkey effortless. let's go 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

bcrontab — manage users' crontab files. that's it. that's the vibe. 👑

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

bcrontab [ -u user ] file

bcrontab [ -u user ] { -l | -r | -e }

so you either hand it a file, or you pick exactly one of -l, -r, or -e — no mixing and matching, bestie, it's giving choose-your-own-adventure not buffet 🎀

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

bcrontab talks to the bcron-spool daemon to manage crontab files that live inside the privileged spool directory. so like, it's not just out here raw-editing files wherever — it goes through the daemon, which is the whole point, the security of it all, we love to see it 🔥

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -u user — tells bcron-spool that we're doing all this on behalf of the named user. and here's the important part, no cap: bcron-spool will only accept that username if bcrontab is running as either root or the same user ID as the named user. so don't think you can just claim to be someone else, the spool said absolutely not 🙅‍♀️
• -l — list the crontab to standard output. show me the receipts, bestie 📋
• -r — remove the user's crontab. gone. deleted. it's over for that crontab 💀
• -e — edit the current crontab. fires up your editor and lets you cook 👩‍🍳

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🦋 ENVIRONMENT 🦋

the vibes are configurable, here's the whole menu:

• VISUAL — if this is set, it's the editor that gets invoked when you edit a crontab. your visual queen gets first pick 👑
• EDITOR — if $VISUAL is not set and this one is, then this is the editor used to edit a crontab. and if neither of them is set? /bin/vi is used. old reliable, the default bestie, the moment 🫶
• BCRON_SOCKET — the path to the named socket used to communicate with bcron-spool. defaults to /var/run/bcron-spool. that's where the gossip happens 🔌
• LOGNAME
• USER — these two get checked in that order to figure out the user name invoking the program. and listen: one of them must be set if you're not using the -u option. it literally cannot read your mind, so set one of these or pass -u, periodt ✨

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🌈 FILES 🌈

when bcrontab needs to edit the current crontab, it tries to write a temporary file into the current directory first, and if that doesn't work out, it falls back to /tmp. gotta have somewhere to stash the draft while you're still cooking 📝

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🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

• bcron-spool(8)
• crontab(5)

go read those too, iykyk, they're the supporting cast and they ate 💅

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💖 AUTHOR 💖

Bruce Guenter <bruce@untroubled.org> — thank you for your service, legend 🌟

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! 🥳 no crumbs left, every flag accounted for. this was bcrontab(1) from the General Commands Manual — consider yourself fully informed, go forth and manage those crontabs responsibly, mwah 💋🌸